


torch the bridge

by seventeencrows



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Found Family, Gen, Post-Canon, could be read as minffel or not, doug eiffel has a bad time, renee minkowski has a slightly worse time, this is fine they are fine everyone is FINE okay just don't worry about it they've got this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-12
Updated: 2017-06-12
Packaged: 2018-11-13 03:15:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,208
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11175837
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seventeencrows/pseuds/seventeencrows
Summary: The thing they don’t tell you about surviving, about fighting your way back home and licking your wounds, about chipping away at a semblance of a life when everyone you love is either dead or thinks you are—the thing they don’t tell you is that you usually wish you hadn’t.(Eiffel and Minkowski attempt to survive in a world they’re no longer welcome in. They do…alright.)





	torch the bridge

**Author's Note:**

> title from "heel turn 2" by the mountain goats: _let all the trash rain down / from way up in the rafters / i’m walking out of here in one piece / don’t care what comes after / drive the wedge / torch the bridge / i don't want to die in here_

It’s been three hundred and seventeen days since Renee Minkowski clawed her bloody, beaten way back to Earth. Three hundred and seventeen days since they holed up in the middle of bumfuck nowhere in a forgotten town in a flyover state, eight hundred and ninety-five days since she sent that message home to her husband, three hundred and seventy-seven days since they left Lovelace and Hera, cold and alone in that hollow, empty station—

But _anyway—_

It’s been three hundred and seventeen days since they stumbled into a little old lady’s house with a lie so big it still wraps around their throats every time they take a breath (“we saw your sign, we’re not from around here but we’re getting jobs in town, we heard you were renting a place?”), and if Eiffel doesn’t stop flirting with the take-out kid every time they order wonton soup just to make the boy blush and stutter, Renee is going to strangle him with his own tube socks.

She watches him from her spot on the kitchen counter, rolls her eyes when the kid flushes all the way up to his ears at whatever slick line Eiffel happens to be pulling out of his ass this time. She can’t quite make out the words but she knows Doug’s tone—quiet and rumbling, buzzing with humour—and when he shuts the door with food in hand, he looks entirely too satisfied with himself.

“You’re going to give him a complex,” she tells him, taking one of the bags he holds out. “Or else you’re going to find a love letter in the mailbox.”

“I’m giving him _practice,_ ” Eiffel insists, rummaging around for a pair of forks. “Real world experience. No one ever taught me to flirt and look at me now—barely scraping by, living with a roommate at my age, eating takeout right from the box!”

Renee rolls her eyes again in lieu of an answer, clears away the soy sauce packets and plastic sporks and fistful of fortune cookies and pats the countertop next to her. They have a perfectly decent table in the kitchen, courtesy of their landlady (who took one look at them both and must’ve seen something in them that warranted kindness, pity—or in Doug, at least, Minkowski still tastes gunpowder and smells blood whenever she closes her eyes too long, she is deserving of nothing more than retribution) and some extra chairs Eiffel’s picked up from somewhere, but Eiffel hops up on the laminate next to her and starts picking through a container of noodles.

They’re halfway through dinner before she speaks again, starts, “Ei—” and thinks better of it, clears her throat and recovers with, “I can take out the trash tonight if you want to do the dishes, Doug.”

He catches it, he always does, what she doesn’t say as well as what she does, the way she waffles between _Eiffel_ and _Doug_ —one feels too sharp in her mouth and the other too soft, unfamiliar and casual like she hasn’t quite _earned_ it. He only ever calls her Minkowski, though she’s heard him choke on _Commander_ more times than either of them would care to admit.

“Two forks for the price of a stroll down our mile-long driveway and the hundred percent chance of running into Mary Kay while I’m down there?” He finishes picking through the noodles and reaches for the container in Renee’s hands, “Done deal.”

“You’ve _got_ to stop calling her Mary Kay. That’s not her name.”

He arches an eyebrow and makes off with a piece of her chicken before she can slap his hand away. “She’s already got the pink car, Minkowski, she’s pretty far gone down that rabbit hole.” Around a mouthful of food, he adds, quieter and looking too intently at their water-stained ceiling, “She’s just too— _normal._ Everyone here is just too normal and I feel like the boy in the plastic bubble trying to smile and wave and chat about the newest flavor of Soylent Green and I just—” Doug stabs at a new container of noodles with a little too much vehemence, “I just can’t, you know?”

Renee nudges him with her elbow and hands over the chicken he’s been eyeing. She knows.

 

Doug drops another egg and Renee adds a tally to their chart on the fridge, ducks her head so he can’t see her snort into her coffee. She has no room to laugh, not really, drinking coffee from a mug missing the bottom half of its handle and spider-webbing cracks all across the ceramic from being dropped one too many times they’d forgotten that gravity _exists_ again. It was funny the first dozen times and exasperating the next hundred, but it’s become an everyday thing now, like chasing the racoon out from under the porch and or slapping the side of the fridge so that it’ll grumble back to life after a second or two.

When Renee rolls out of bed for the hundredth time, smacking her elbow into both the nightstand and the floor on the way down, Doug’s already fished out the bag of frozen peas by the time she staggers out of the bedroom in the vague direction of the coffee maker. Somehow, he always seems better-rested than she does even though he spends his nights on the ratty old couch, or at the very least he hides it better. They’d started out sharing the bed at first, the room too empty for either one of them to brave it alone, drowning in the silence that comes with living ten miles outside of town, the feeling of being ages away from any other person too startlingly familiar. But Renee has nightmares—lash-out, kicking, screaming nightmares that rip her out of sleep and Eiffel with her—and more than once she’d woken up to Eiffel totally still and unresponsive next to her, eyes glued to the ceiling and nails digging deep into the palms of his hands. One night, he moves to the couch and they just don’t talk about it.

There’s nothing to talk _about_ , Renee decides early on; it’s not like they don’t know what keeps the other up at night. It’s not like he doesn’t know hers are about shooting Maxwell and his are an endless reel of Kepler shooting Lovelace, of Jacobi blowing a hole in Hera and the stuttering glitch of her voice over and over and over the speakers long after she was gone, of the flickering lights and rattling cold that followed. It feels like some mornings they wake up and know they were dreaming about the same thing, funhouse mirror versions of the same memories—how loud Jacobi’s voice was, cracked and screaming at the other end of her gun and Kepler’s cold, calm face on the other side of the airlock glass, the way the release button plastic must have felt so smooth and deadly and _fragile_ under Doug’s palm when he pressed it. The way they gutted the comms panel and just _left_ Jacobi there; he was too dangerous to force along and too stubborn to agree to go so they left him, jettisoned with minutes to spare before the contact event, staring out the window until their rotting station was a dot against the backlight of Wolf 359.

“Sometimes I feel like Lovelace is still alive,” Eiffel murmurs while Renee ices her arm on the frozen peas, “like we left her up there, alone, not even Hera to—”

 _“Stop.”_ Renee picks her arm up off the peas, lets the throbbing ache ground her. “Stop. You know that’s not—”

“Not possible?” he asks, all tight smile and tired eyes. “Like _aliens hijacking a star to talk to us_ impossible? Like _deadly space virus_ impossible? Minkowski—”

“He shot her in the _head_ ,” she grits out, digs her elbow into the countertop, sucks a breath around the pulse of pain.

“You don’t have to tell me,” Doug snaps back, “I was _there_.”  

They’re silent for a moment later before Eiffel rakes his hands through his hair and groans. “Fuck, I’m sorry.”

The bag of peas is dripping on the countertop now, and Renee traces an idle pattern through the water. “I know.”

“It’s just—”

“Yeah.”

“We shouldn’t have left them up there. Any of them.”

Renee sighs and tosses the half-thawed bag into the sink. “No, we shouldn’t have.”

 

The world grinds to a halt when Doug starts coughing.

He doesn’t protest when she shoves him into the rattling death trap they’ve appropriated as a car and doesn’t mention that she stays a steady five miles over the speed limit the entire way there, and Renee picks at her fingernails while the doctor looks Eiffel over and tactfully doesn’t comment on the fact that she really shouldn’t be in the room with them. They don’t look at each other while the doctor pokes and prods and measures so they don’t have to admit how useless this is, how the only doctor worth his weight in Decima is eight light years away on a station that’s no doubt fallen into the star nearly a year ago, or that Alexander Hilbert was nothing but cinders long before that.

 _A cold,_ the doctor tells them. _Seasonal,_ he adds, scribbling out a prescription and packing away his things. Doug pulls his sweatshirt back over his head and doesn’t see the way Renee’s fingers twitch against the vinyl seat, the way she wants to say _check again, check again you missed it, you missed it and it’s back and it’s going to kill him and this time I don’t have a molecular biologist in my back pocket, just veins full of useless blood and a car that won’t get him to a hospital in time to save his life, not this time—_

They drop the prescription off at the pharmacy and spend the half hour wait wandering up and down the cold medicine aisle. “I’m fine,” Eiffel mutters, watching her watch the technicians hustling behind the pharmacy glass like her eyeballs alone could inspire them to _move the hell faster_.

“No, you’re not,” she says, still staring.

He sighs, wraps a warm hand around her shoulder. “No, I’m not— _generally_. But _this_ is fine. I just got a cold, you heard the doctor.”

She turns abruptly enough to yank his hand from her shoulder. He looks terribly tired and pale and Renee stares at his face long enough that he starts to squirm, looking for the virus crawling under his skin and eating him alive from the inside, looking for all of those signs she missed the first time around. It isn’t until a woman bundles her cart past them down the narrow aisle that Renee jumps, surprised, and glances away. She’s sudden aware, half-catching her reflection in the glare of the pharmacy plexiglass, that she doesn’t look a lot better. “What if it’s not?” she demands, hollowed out and so, so tired of being afraid.

Eiffel thinks about it for a long, long minute before deciding on, “Then I want a full Viking funeral. The body of water is totally up to you and I’m fine if you use a lighter and some hairspray instead of a flaming arrow, but at least— _Jesus!”_

She punches him then, hard enough to shut him up mid-prattle and she stares resolutely at the pharmacy techs again if only to keep Eiffel from seeing her grin. “Shut up.” She doesn’t flinch when Eiffel wraps his arms around her waist and rests his head on her shoulder, just wrinkles her nose because his breath smells like coffee. “You’ll tell me,” she adds, serious now, wrapping her hands around his, “if something’s wrong, right? If you’re not—” how can she _put this_ , “if you’re not okay?”

“Of course,” he says, voice muffled by her jacket, “yeah, Minkowski. But I’m fine. We’re gonna be fine.”

The pharmacist gestures for them before Renee can respond. She’s not sure what she would have said.

 

“What do you mean, you don't remember her _name?_ ” Renee hisses through her teeth as she and Doug pick their way through the crowded diner to where Mr. and Mrs. Mary Kay are waving at them.

“I feel like that’s a totally self-explanatory statement,” he hisses back around his too-wide smile.

“I _told_ you to stop calling her Mary Kay!”

“And I didn’t listen! Honestly, Minkowski, I don’t know why you’re acting like this is anything new—Hey!” Doug flaps his hands for Renee to slide into the booth first and then takes a seat. “Thanks for inviting us out!”

“Of course!” says Mary Kay, with lips that match her nails in a way that Renee’s only ever seen in Stepford, Connecticut. “It feels like you’ve been living just down the road from us for so long, and we’ve never really had a chance to connect!”

“Yeah,” adds Mr. Mary Kay (who’s probably named something like John or Mark or Bill, if she had to take a stab at it), fingers toying with the edge of the menu like everyone here isn’t a regular, like the only reason the waitress will even come by to take orders is because this is probably the first time Renee and Doug have ever set foot in here, “yeah, it’s been quite a minute since y’all’ve—” he pauses, brows furrowed just a touch even though he’s _still smiling_ , “since y’all joined us.”

It’s startling, almost, how no one really _quite_ asks questions here, how they make general statements that Renee and Eiffel can choose to ignore _(you two have known each other a while, you two don’t look like you’re from around here, the lights are on at y’all’s house pretty late into the night)_ , how no one raised any eyebrows when their landlady handed them the keys before they’d even had jobs, how they’d gotten _jobs_ with fewer questions and more help than they’d expected—”I’m not looking to hire,” one man told Renee, “but I’ll call Dan down the way, he needs help on the ranch and you look like you can lift a bag of feed,” how the bookstore owner had looked Eiffel up and down, snapped, “Don’t steal from the till and don’t let that goddamn pigeon in here,” and then sent him to pull that week’s new display down from the attic storage.

Renee jumps at the hand on her knee and realizes the conversation has moved on without her, that Mary Kay and her husband are starting, perhaps, to stare. Doug squeezes just once before he pulls his hand away, and he arches an eyebrow. “I was just telling Frank that I think you’d be more of a DC girl than a Marvel one.”

Frank, damnit, Renee wasn’t even _close_ —“I wasn’t much for comic books at all,” she tells the table, and grins, adds, “But I do really like those Iron Man movies,” just to see Eiffel press his hands to his face and groan dramatically. Frank and Mary Kay (whose name, Renee learns later, is _actually_ Mary) laugh in the appropriate lull and the waitress comes by to bring drinks and grab orders and this is—this is almost normal, almost _fun_ , and Renee sinks back into the vinyl of the booth and lets it wash over her.

“Oh my god, have you seen this video?” is what she remembers Doug saying, right before everything goes to shit. It’s an odd enough thing that it catches her attention; they’ve been gone for so long, missed so much between being trapped in space and then trapped in their home, terrified of making a wrong move and catching Goddard’s eye, that there is very little that they could have seen that literally anyone else wouldn’t have already, and Renee sits up, leans forward just as Doug reaches for Frank’s phone to pull up the search bar. “It’s this dumb video,” Eiffel is saying, “on some website called Vine, and I swear I laughed for like twenty minutes—Hera, darlin’, can you find that video of the kid freaking out over some weed and calling the cops on the microwave?”

Neither one of them realizes at first, leaning closer to watch the ellipses pulse on Frank’s screen, that anything could possibly go wrong. It’s so innocuous a question, like any one they could’ve asked a dozen times in the last few years, that it steals the air from the room when Renee _remembers_ an instant before Frank’s phone responds, “I’m sorry, but my name is Siri—I’ve brought up videos with the words _microwave cops weed_ in the tags, is this what you were looking for?”

She doesn’t have to look at Eiffel to know he’s ashen, she can hear it in his voice when he clears his throat and presses his palm flat on the table, mumbles, “Excuse me,” before he all-but runs away. His voice sounds strangled in a way it hasn’t since he was choking on his own blood and Renee is left floundering in his wake, stammers out something about how tired Doug has been, hasn’t been getting much sleep, he’ll be back in a second, she’s sure of it, he just needs to splash some water on his face.

Eiffel is conspicuously absent for the rest of dinner, which is itself stilted and awkward and very brief. Nobody complains when Renee bullshits an excuse to leave early and she only argues with Frank for a moment over who’ll pay for a meal she hasn’t touched, and then she’s flinging herself into the car and pulling out of the parking lot before she’s even bothered to turn on the headlights or buckle her damn seatbelt.

There are, in fact, _literally_ a million places Doug could be—this isn't the winding corridors and hidden rooms of the Hephaestus, this is the big, wide, terrible world that could gobble Douglas Eiffel up without a second thought and not leave Renee even a knucklebone to remember him by. He didn’t take the car, obviously, and the one bus that weaves its way around town doesn’t run this late so he couldn’t have gotten far and there are few places he would go but home, but that doesn’t stop Renee imagining sleek black cars with a too-familiar logo pulling up next to Eiffel as he walks home, Warren Kepler’s cold hands reaching out to yank him in, or Jacobi’s seething, angry, alive ones—

The tail end of the car swerves in the gravel as she screeches to a stop at the end of the driveway, taking the porch steps in one stride and storming through the ajar door. She catches herself reaching for a gun she no longer has, strapped to a flight suit she burned at the end of their first week back, but the house is totally empty. The lights are still out and everything is in its rightful place, nothing but the distant sound of the shower running. It’s old habit that Renee stalks down the hallway like she once did the air vents, looking for a different sort of monster, but the farther she gets into the house the more it seems like they’re still safe, hidden, dead, that no one’s come to drag them kicking and screaming back to Goddard, back to space—

The light is on and the shower is running and Doug is in it when she nudges the door open, still wearing his clothes from dinner, hair plastered to his face under the force of the spray. Renee doesn’t spot the bottle of tequila until she climbs into the tub and sits down next to him. Eiffel jerks his head up and blinks at her for a moment, not quite focused on her face, before he breaks into an easy smile and says, “L-Literally the only thing in this town that—” he hiccups, and it echoes, “that doesn’t close at sundown in this town is the, um, the liquor store.”

“I can see that.”

“It—It’s kind of f-funny,” Eiffel tells her, a mock whisper that echoes across the tile. “They didn’t even ask, hm, a-ask me for my—” he pauses, frowns, “my thing. That says I’m me. It’s plastic?”

Renee swallows around the glass in her throat, lips twitching because he’s still Doug, still _funny_ —this is probably the most _Doug_ he’s ever been, this is him from before she ever knew him, pre-Goddard but still post-disaster—“Your driver’s license?”

“That!”

“Which you don’t have, anymore. Since we’re dead.”

“That.” Doug frowns again, tilts his head back to lean against the shower wall. The spray catches him right in the face and he splutters but doesn’t move, says around a mouthful of water, “Tomorrow morning is gonna suck.”

Renee pries the bottle away from him with less resistance than she had expected and sets it down outside the tub, sits opposite Doug and stretches her legs out. “Yeah,” she says, for lack of something else, something comforting or helpful or even remotely cheery—”Yeah, probably.”

Doug is silent for a long while, long enough that Renee starts to wonder if he hasn’t fallen asleep with water still skating down his face, but he finally mumbles, “Sh-Sorry for leaving you with Mary Kay and her husband.” A second later, he starts to giggle, slapping a hand over his face, blurts, “I can’t believe her name is actually _Mary—_ ” and after the night they’ve had, Renee starts laughing too. First small giggles and then gasping, wheezing cackles, clutching at their chests and ribs and each other until Renee thinks tomorrow might not be so terrible.

 

Her chat with the liquor store manager goes well. Her chat with Doug goes—less so.

The door bounces off the wall when Eiffel comes home, and Renee is waiting for him. “What the _hell_ ,” he starts, spitting venom, “did you do?”

She leans against the sink, digs her forearms into the edge of the basin and runs her hands under the spray, hangs her head. “Exactly what it sounds like I should have, if you went back to the liquor store at _ten in the morning._ ”

“Oh, I didn’t go to the liquor store,” he tells her, “I ran into _Patty_ at work, when she came in for the next book in the series her club is reading and spent half an hour chewing my ear off about how my _sister_ is so sweet, and gives such a _shit_ about my well-being, that she stopped by the store to make it _abundantly_ clear that Patty isn’t supposed to sell me any more booze under any goddamn circumstances!” He’s yelling by the end of it, breathing hard and face red, wild in his rage.

Renee sighs. “I figured you would thank me in the morning,” she looks at him when she says it, watches him flinch, “when you sobered back up.”

She’s callous and he’s startled, jerking back, face sheetrock pale for an _instant_ before it twists back into indignation. “You’re not my boss anymore, goddamnit!” he snarls, “You can’t just—”

“I’m not your boss, Eiffel! I’m your _friend!”_ It echoes around them like a gunshot, eerie over the running water. Renee runs a wet hand through her hair before she can think better of it. “I’m your friend and I’m going to have your back, whether you like it or not.” She steps away from the counter and sinks into one of the chairs. After a minute of standing awkwardly over her, drained of rage and awkward in the wake of it, Eiffel sits down opposite her. “It’s my job to keep you safe.”

“Co—Minkowski, it’s not your _job_ —”

“No!” Renee tilts her head back, huffs at the ceiling. “No, it is. I didn’t do it on the station, or when the star turned blue, or when Kepler showed up, but I’m—” She presses her face into her hands, shoulders hunched. “I’m going to get it right this time.”

The hand on hers makes her jump but she stands when he pulls, tries not to balk when Doug shoos her out of the room and down the hall toward the bedroom. “You’ve been up all day, you should go take a nap,” he says, but she also hears what he doesn’t. He turns back to the sink, turns on the water. “I’ve got a job, too.”  

 

 _“Want me to wash the dishes?”_ Eiffel asks one day while Renee is pouring coffee into her mug.

There’s something—something _wrong_ about the way he says it, enough to make Renee pause mid-pour and look up. She can’t figure out _what_ , exactly, rubs her the wrong way, doesn’t know if she misheard him or is just too paranoid, too twitchy, to field even a question about splitting chores without spiraling into an anxiety attack. Renee frowns.

Doug frowns too, asks again, _“Want me to wash the dishes?”_ and this time—

 _This time_ she hears it, hears the strange, the weird of the _words_ , not what he’s saying but how he asks it, hears—

He draws back, glances away, brows knitting together and a blush high on his cheeks, flustered. “I just—fuck— _want me to wash the dishes?”_ and finally, Renee hears, _“Veux que je fasse la vaisselle?”_

It _blindsides_ her. There are a thousand and one things Renee expects to hear come out of Eiffel’s mouth on a daily basis, most ridiculous and several unfit for polite company, but French—short of _pardon my French_ , he’d say, before he taught Hera something truly abhorrent and she would, of course, tell him how to actually say it in French—her language, her hearth and home and heritage, isn’t one of them. His accent is terrible and he pronounces half the letters he shouldn’t and he drops the pronoun like he’s speaking Spanish and Renee is frozen. It aches in a way she didn’t expect, in a way she didn’t know it could anymore, and she can’t muster enough wherewithal to say a thing when Eiffel cracks a grin and fiddles with the hem of his shirt, cheeks red and eyes fixed on the toaster, says, “I got most of that from a forty year old textbook and Google Translate, so sorry if I, like, asked you where to buy a pair of broccoli or something.”

Renee has one bizarre, jarring moment where she almost, _almost_ responds in French. There’s so much she wants to say, tongue tripping over an accent she shed like her eighth grade glasses or her father’s name— _je suis claqué_ _,_ _comment l'a tu su?_ _,_ _tu me comprends?_ —but her voice catches against the back of her teeth instead. There’s a bloom of heat on her hand when the coffee spills over the lip of her mug, dripping down her fingers, splattering on grubby linoleum. Her throat clicks, dry. “Doug, I—”

His hand is at her elbow instantly, other arm wrapping around her waist and she’s falling, sinking to the floor. Her knees hit hard right in the coffee she just spilled and her hands are already at her face and this is so _embarrassing_. Eiffel molds himself against her spine and rests his chin on her shoulder, confused but comforting, mumbling a low, reassuring constant under her sobbing, “Hey, _hey_ , C—Minkowski, _hey_ , you’re fine, you’re fine, I—shit, I’m sorry—I got you, we’re _okay_ , okay? Minkowski, seriously, you’re scaring me here, please—”

“I’m—” she hiccups, scrubs her hands over her face, across her eyes, “I’m fine, Eiffel—Doug, I’m fine, really—” She sits back on her heels and he lets her, scoots back so she has room to breathe. “You just surprised me, that’s—that’s all.”

“That’s,” Doug pauses, scowls, “okay, well, I don’t remember the French word for _bullshit_ is, but this would be it.” He frowns for a moment longer before adding, quieter, “I didn’t think it would—I didn’t know. I’m sorry.”

Renee reaches for a dishtowel and slaps it haphazardly over the spilled coffee. “Neither did I.” As the adrenaline ebbs away, she cracks a smile, snickers. “You were—I’m sorry, Eiffel, but you were _awful_.”

He rears back, slaps a hand against his chest, dramatic to a fault. “I thought I did _great!”_

“I could barely understand you! Why didn't you _ask_ me?”

“I wanted it to be a surprise!”

It makes her pause, eyes wide, mouth half open, struck by the _kindness_ of it. Doug must realize what he said, what exactly it means, and he glances away, cheeks red. Renee scrubs the towel back and forth for a minute before settling on, “Thank you, Doug. Really.”

“Don’t mention it.”

A beat, and then, “If you think I’m not going to _mention_ it, with your grammar that _despicable_ , Doug Eiffel, you have another thing coming—”

 

“Minkowski.”

Renee hums under her breath while she chops onions, scraping them from the cutting board into the bowl and wondering if perhaps she’s cut too many for the dip to be any good.

“Minkowski.”

Her family never did neighborhood events when she was little, no matter what country they were in, they moved around too much for it and were emphatically exhausted of neighborliness by the time they finally put down roots in California. She and Dom weren’t huge potluck folks either—both _unbelievably_ busy with work and the vast majority of their free time wound up spent on the couch with popcorn and a stack of movies, and even _then_ one or the other of them fell asleep halfway through.

“Renee?”

But after the debacle that was dinner with the Mary-Kays last month, she and Eiffel had decided they couldn’t afford _not_ to show up to Erin and Hunter’s (Emma and Harrison? Eileen and Hector’s?) pool party—or was it a graduation party, _Jesus,_ they need to get their shit together—

_“Commander!”_

She jumps, whirls on her heel when the hand lands heavy and hard on her shoulder, knife tight in a white-knuckled fist—she only stops when she sees Doug’s scared, drawn face, one hand on her shoulder and the other still mid-reach. Her breath is shaky when she steps back, heart still pounding in her ears when she rests the knife against the counter. She doesn’t quite set it down and tries not to think about why she finds its weight in her hand so comforting. “I’m _sorry_ , Doug, goddamnit. You startled me.”

If anything, Eiffel is the one who looks startled; he looks _terrified_ , actually, when he pulls his hands away. “I was trying to get your attention and it was like Doug of the Dead for a second there—you just kept chopping and staring at the microwave and I thought—” He laughs, uneasy. “I was just being jumpy, I guess?”  

“I—oh.” Renee sets down the knife and scratches the back of her neck, sheepish. “Sorry, Doug. I didn’t realize you were talking to me.”

Doug looks nothing short of horrified when he tells her, “I was saying your _name._ ”

She pauses. “Oh.”

“Oh? _Oh?_ ” His voice cracks. “What the _hell_ , Minkowski?”

“I’m sorry!” she snaps. “I was a million miles away, I was thinking about the stupid party, I didn’t hear you!” She cracks her knuckles while Eiffel scowls at her. “Okay?”

It’s not okay, and he doesn’t have to say it. She reads it in the way he crosses his arms over his chest, how he hunches his shoulders and bites his lip. How scared he is that her own name fits her like a too-big flight suit now, and how scared he is that she doesn’t seem that scared of it at all.

Renee goes back to chopping onions. There’s not much more she can do.

 

“Look, Eiffel, I know it’s been a little while since we’ve had this conversation, but this is a _Bad Idea._ Capital letters.”

“And yet, even though we’ve had this conversation a thousand times, you still don’t get that I’m going to do it anyway!”

There's an absurd moment where she wants to grab him by the ear, or by his ratty tee (“You wanna know how I got these scars? Got ‘em when a mad scientist stabbed me in the lung to keep me from dying of the deadly death virus he infected me with in the first place—yeah, not a chat I want to have, Minkowski, I'm keeping the shirt on.”) and drag him as far the fuck away from here as she can manage—but she doesn’t. Not because Doug is an adult, or because he can make his own shitty decisions, or because sometimes Renee is exhausted of being the voice of reason; mostly, she doesn’t stop him because their neighbors are all watching out of the corners of their eyes and they can’t really afford to be making any sort of scene.

So she lets Eiffel get into pool.

She sees it flicker across his face the exact moment it happens, when the the buoyancy goes from novel, pleasant surprise and something they’d missed in all their years away, to something too familiar, too terrible. Doug flounders as the panic sets in, the weightlessness of water turning into something else—Renee knows what’s happening, has known it since one of the farmhands dragged her to an aerobics class at the only gym in town and she’d thought she’d be _fine_ to take a dip in the pool after her shower, knows the cold that’s starting at Doug’s fingers and toes and racing inward like the black haze across his vision, the way his chest feels clamped and tight and unwieldy in the face of his terror. So Renee Minkowski does the only thing she can do, with Eiffel having a panic attack ten feet away and the other partygoers starting to notice something was amiss: she takes one step, another, and trips and falls into the pool.

The water stings when it slaps at her. She’s hit it wrong and there’s a pause just before the surface breaks and closes over her, a snap of cold and a breath before the water is over her head. It’s just as awful as the time at the gym but she’s ready for it now, feels her shoulder brush the bottom of the pool and kicks up. A jolt of panic curls in her gut when it takes her longer to reach the surface than she’d anticipated but then the air is cold against her cheeks and her hair wraps across her face and neck.  Next to her, Doug is just starting to come back to himself in his surprise—Renee grabs him by the arm and practically drags him out, slipping and sliding up the inset stairs until they’re breathing hard at the pool’s edge. She pretends that Doug’s hands are shaking because of the cold, doesn’t look down so she can convince herself that hers aren’t shaking at all.

“Renee! Doug! Oh my god, are you alright?” It’s Mary Kay, setting down her drink and taking a step toward them. Other neighbors, too, start to mill about in concern. This is _exactly_ what they’d been hoping to avoid.

Doug is still staring out at the water, hands digging into his knees. Renee clears her throat. “Yeah—Yes. Fine. I’m sorry about that, I’ve always had two left feet.”

Doug comes alive then, mutters, “That’s only for dancing.”

Renee elbows him just as people approach to give them a hand and shepherd them away for a set of borrowed, dry clothes. “I’d like to think it’s an all-purpose excuse.”

Just before Henry (Harold?) pulls Eiffel away to find him something to wear, he grabs Renee’s wrist, mouths _thank you_ , and is gone.

Someone presses a glass into her hand when she comes back downstairs in a borrowed dress. “You look like you need a stiff glass of something,” they tell her as she brings it to her mouth, and it tastes nice, tastes good, actually. She takes the one meant for Doug when he walks up, sets it down on the table while no one is watching. Doug watches it go but doesn’t reach for it, and Renee thinks that’s a victory.

The conversation moves them into the house, milling about with other people and ducking in and out of conversations. It’s a totally _normal,_ totally _fine_ neighborly party until their mailman—they’ve literally only seen him once, dead men get no bills—grins at Renee’s glass, turns back to Hugo (?) and yells, “Bringing out the good shit, huh, buddy?”

He’s too loud and a little too close and it makes Eiffel jump, turn to Renee and mouth _the good shit?_ She hadn’t even seen the label on the bottle when they poured it for her—

She sees the blood drain from Eiffel’s face before she hears Hal—Hank? Harry? they _really_ need to learn their neighbors’ names—say, “I just like the feel of it in my hand, you know?” and the glass in her hand is a cattle brand now, expensive crystal filigree searing into her palm. Eiffel moves but she’s faster, she’s _always_ been faster, and she spots the label on the bottle before Doug can get there to wrap his hand around it.

Renee lurches, briefly considers throwing up all over Ella’s—Emily’s?—pristine mint-green carpet. Eiffel’s in her periphery, saying something over the roaring in her ears and the sudden crunch and it all filters in at once: ”Min— _Renee_ , oh my _god_ , how did you even—are you okay?”

One deep breath. Another. Again. The roaring dulls, just a bit, just enough that their neighbors’ horrified, stunned faces come into focus. “Why,” she grits out, “wouldn’t I be okay?”

Doug doesn’t answer; Doug is moving between her and their neighbors, blocking her from view. “She doesn’t know her own strength,” he says, chuckles high and too-loud, “I saw her break a coffee mug with her fist once on accident too—and this was totally an accident, I swear, and I will totally pay for that glass—” He straightens, glances at Minkowski over his shoulder and grimaces. “Just let me get her home, okay?”

Hal-Hank-Harry appears over Doug’s shoulder just as Renee realizes her hand really _hurts_. “Are you sure you shouldn’t take her to a _hospital?_ ”

“Sure, sure, yeah—” her hand is throbbing and Doug’s voice cuts in and out in her ears. There’s a moment where he murmurs _let’s go_ after he’s made their apologies and grips her arm to pull her out of the house and to their car, that his voice drops, turns smooth and slick like the whiskey that burns down the back of her throat now, and it’s all Renee can do not to flinch out of his _(Kepler’s)_ grasp.

Doug jerks the car into drive and peels off down the driveway, glancing in the rearview mirror at the people crowded on the porch to watch them go. He turns left onto the road that will take them into town, and waits until they’re gone from view before turning back towards home. They’ve been so careful not to get sick, get hurt, to avoid anything that would have to involve the hospital in the big city and not just the small clinic in town where the receptionist had laughed and given them a pass when Doug had patted down both his pockets and Renee’s in an attempt to find a driver’s license they both knew he didn’t have. After a few minutes spent staring out the window and being rhythmically blinded by the passing streetlights, Renee sets about picking the glass out of her hand under their sporadic illumination.

She’s almost got all of them out by the time Eiffel notices. He makes a panicked noise in the back of his throat and says, “Hey! Hey, Minkowski, don’t do that. I’ll get the tweezers at home, okay, just—just take it easy, okay?”

They get back into the house without incident and Doug hovers for a few minutes to make sure Renee stays put at the table before he goes to get the first aid kit. There wasn’t much glass to deal with, luckily, but several of the larger pieces have made a Rorschach print of Renee’s palm, blood blooming and smearing across the lines and valleys of her hand. Doug returns and patches her hand up in silence, wincing with her when he presses the alcohol wipe to her wounds. His hands are shaking by the end of it, but it’s not until she looks at his face that Renee realizes he’s trembling with rage. She sits up straighter, brows furrowed. “Doug—?”

“This is never going to stop, is it?” he snaps, hands splayed against the tabletop, fingers stretching wide like he’s going to claw down to the pulp of it. “We’re never going to be able to use a fucking phone, or go to the doctor, or drinking a fucking glass of whiskey without losing our goddamn minds, are we? We’re never going to get far enough away from this, we’re never going to be _safe_ , _are we?”_

Renee sighs, cradling her cut-up hand in the other. “I don’t know.”

“No!” Doug bites out, surging to his feet. His fingers curl and uncurl into fists. “We’re the ones who lived! We’re the ones who made it back and made it home and I _hate_ this, I hate that this doesn’t feel any different than being up there did! _Sure_ , we don’t have the Agents Smith trying to kill us, but we can’t even talk to our fucking neighbors without Hulking out on their fine china! It’s _bullshit!”_ He swings his arms wide, most likely to emphasize the general magnitude of the bullshit in question. The back of his fingers catch the handle of the mug Renee had meant to put back in the cupboard before they’d left hours ago; it’s one that Mary Kay had given her, pink and white stripes and always smelling faintly of nail polish no matter how many times Renee had washed it. The force of his hand hooks the handle around his fingertips for a moment and it goes flying across the kitchen to shatter on the far wall.

Doug curls in on himself, deflating as the anger drains out and the consequences creep in to take its place—if there’s anything Doug Eiffel is used to, it’s his shit decisions having immediate and vicious repercussions. The silence after the clatter is deafening and Doug turns to her, mouth open and ready to apologize—

Renee isn’t sure if she starts laughing so hard she cries or is crying so hard it starts to feel funny, but she sucks in a deep breath before Doug can get too concerned and gasps out, “I’ve always _hated_ that mug,” and dissolves back into laughter. She tries to bury her face in her hands, jolts when it presses her freshly-bandaged cuts and pull a sour face and that’s what does Eiffel in. He grins weakly and sits back down, twisting his fingers together. Renee reaches out with her free hand and covers both of his. “We’re going to be—” she pauses, “well, maybe not _fine_ , exactly, but we’re going to be okay. Besides,” she adds, “I don’t really even like whiskey.”

Doug snorts. “You don’t like the feel of it in your hand?”

“I could get rid of it and things would be more or less _fine_ , yeah.”

Doug smiles wider, then, for real this time. “I’m—I’m glad you’re okay.” He rakes a hand through his hair. “No more neighborhood parties.”

“Oh god no,” Renee blurts, “never again. Just us?”

“Yeah. Just us.”

 

She leaves it on the table for him to find.

Maybe it's a waste of time, she thinks as she runs a hand across the laminated paper again—the clerk at the post office had given her such an odd look when she’d come in with a smudged printout of an article from a year ago in a town that had nothing to do with theirs ( _weird thing to scrapbook_ , he’d said, in that way that no one really asks questions around here)—maybe Doug’s looked this up already, maybe she's rubbing salt in the wound for no reason, hurting when she’s only trying to help, but—Renee sighs. But she’s already done it and it’s already here and she can hear the crunch of gravel as Eiffel pulls up the drive, so, here goes.

It had started as looking up her favorite editorial from Dom’s newspaper, partly grit her teeth through the tightness in her chest at the familiar header and suffer through it as something she _had_ to do, and partly so she could follow the hyperlink chain to Dom’s editor page on the newspaper’s personnel bio section. It—hurt less than she had expected, less than she’d wanted it to, and she couldn’t stay on it for very long. Goddard could be paying attention, tracking who visits these pages, she tells herself, and it doesn’t quite sound like a lie.

She should’ve walked away then, left the library computer for someone else, but instead a clandestine search about drunk driving accidents in Texas spiraled down the rabbit hole until she’s opening an article about a miraculous recovery, about a thriving Deaf girl starring in her school’s production of _The Pirates of Penzance_ , and Renee runs scrambling for the printer.

When Eiffel must come across the article, Renee is in the shower—this is a private thing, she figures. The lines between them as their own people have smudged and faded and been scribbled over so many times but this, this is different. This is Doug’s _daughter_.

He’s lying on the couch when she wanders back into the living room, staring at the ceiling with the article clutched to his chest, tears running down the sides of his face into his hairline. She squeezes his ankle as she walks by and slips out the back door and onto their porch. It’s huge for the house it wraps around, old and homey and solid, and Renee catches the tail end—literally—of the cat she must’ve just scared away from the steps. It’s ragged, sketchy, skittish thing that she’s seen wandering around from the very first day and doesn’t belong to anyone as far as she can tell. Renee checks the water in the bowl she leaves out for it, sits down on the porch bench for just a moment and, against all odds, falls asleep.

She knows it’s a dream almost immediately, and that almost makes it worse. Lovelace is there, and Doug, and Kepler, but Renee—Renee wasn’t here for this, was halfway across the station with different blood on her hands, but she’s here now and Kepler smiles, Kepler turns the gun on her and this is _fine_ , this is _right_ , this is the _way it should be, the way it should have ended if only they’d be safe, if only everyone would be safe, she’ll go back and take the bullet for them over and over and over again until she gets it right—_

Renee snaps awake to a buzzing in her chest and the smell of milkweed, to a pollen-covered, furiously  scraggly thing curled up under her arm, jammed against her side and purring like all hell. It feels like the Hephaestus is buzzing and whirring and alive right under her skin and it grounds her, lets her suck in breath after breath until the afterimage of a barrel of a gun fades away against the sky above her. One eye cracks open to appraise her and then slowly slides shut, and Renee can see into the house from here, can see that Doug is here and alive and asleep on the couch. She digs her fingers into thick fur and the cat sighs heavily and sneezes into the crook of her elbow and lets her.

 

Doug makes them both watch Lilo and Stitch one night, even though he already knows it verbatim and even though he does the Stitch voice whenever she tries to get him to put the toilet paper roll on the _right_ way, even though he falls asleep on the couch plastered against Renee. He’s heavy and warm and mouth-breathing against her shoulder, and he still has that printed-out article within arm’s reach. Her hand still aches but it’s duller now, itchy and healing, and Doug only woke her once last night when the nightmares got too bad.

None of their neighbors have called them since the party. They don’t have any mail, or a fridge that works, and the enterprising racoon has worked its way through the porch and into their basement. Neither of them can sleep through the night or stare too long at the stars, and it has been three hundred and sixty-seven days since they holed up in the middle of bumfuck nowhere in a forgotten town in a flyover state, nine hundred and forty-five days since she sent that message home to her husband, four hundred and thirty-seven days since they left Lovelace and Hera, cold and alone in that hollow, empty station—

But _anyway—_

They are alive, still, somehow. And it will have to do.

**Author's Note:**

> ran way the fuck away with this omfg, and i’m going to be 100% honest, a lot of this is based on my own personal bullshit living habits and the town and people are based almost entirely on the folk in the tiny podunk 500 people total town i spend 40% of my time in
> 
> i didn't already write this as minffel but reading it back i know it vibes that way. it's totally up to you, folks.
> 
> edit: the amazing, wonderful [gortysproject](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gortysproject/pseuds/gortysproject) made a stunning gifset for this fic, for which i am unendingly flattered and grateful. it can be found [here](http://aihera.tumblr.com/post/163999366693/she-doesnt-flinch-when-eiffel-wraps-his-arms)


End file.
